As the New York Times reported yesterday, New Mexico became the second State in eighteen months to repeal the death penalty. Thirty-five States now authorize the death penalty while fifteen States and the District of Columbia do not [Mike Mannheimer].

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

News coverage of three nooses hanging from the "whites only tree" at Jena High School, in Jena, Louisiana, created public outcry. Criticism rose as the public learned that District Attorney Reed Walters exercised his prosecutorial discretion to decline to press charges against the white students that admitted hanging the nooses, yet over zealously charged black students with attempted murder for conduct normally considered a battery or a school-yard-fight. The apparent lack of equity in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion became the focus of heated debate. Although the Jena High School incidents occurred in 2006, the Jena story is unpleasantly reminiscent of an older and uglier part of American history. A hanging noose is a universal symbol of racist threats of violence. District Attorney Reed Walter's proclamation that this type of conduct was not criminal sent a message of condoning racial intimidation and sparked a wave of copy-cat offenses across the country. This type of prosecutorial indifference toward hate crime negatively frames societal norms of acceptable conduct. Law enforcement's failure to condemn racially motivated criminal also encourages future violence and vigilantism.

This review addresses the prosecutorial veto's negative ripple-effect in hate crime cases. It suggests that unilateral prosecutorial discretion in hate crimes should be limited. Since hate crimes create an enormous impact upon the community as a whole, well-beyond any one individual victim, the community should be given a formal role with regard to charging decisions for hate crimes. This article suggests two ways the legislature can statutorily incorporate community input into the prosecutorial decision-making process: 1) mandating grand jury participation, or 2) authorizing a community enforcement task force for hate crimes. Additionally, this article advocates a third alternative of allowing the use of private prosecutors to pursue hate crime violators when the public prosecutor is unwilling or unable.

About nine months ago, the Supreme Court breathed new life into the Second Amendment, ruling for the first time that it protects an individual right to own guns. Since then, lower federal courts have decided more than 80 cases interpreting the decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, and it is now possible to make a preliminary assessment of its impact.